VAC does not ban till about a month after a cheat has been detected. The principal (I think) is something like those vermin poisons you see that are slow acting, allowing the pests to take it back to the nest and share with everyone.

So, just cuz someone isn't banned immediately doesn't mean they got away with it. Cheaters never know if they have "defeated" VAC till it is too late.

BTW, Valve would have us pay for that too if they were working on it. Will we soon have to pay for all the mods? What kind of community will it be then? <sigh> From socialist utopia to capitalist hell in a product cycle. So, any pro-capitalists out there want to argue that we should manditorially pay mod authors for mods? Was it really so bad before (now).

You only have to pay for mods Valve has gotten involved commercially with... and it is entirely the choice of the mod author to get involved with Valve, so I'd say very little has changed... aside from the fact that, should mod authors become extremely successful, they have the *option* of making a bit of money off their creations (sounds fair).

Naw. The Florida hurricanes were Karmic payback for the USA attack on the holy city of Najaf. If you look at the time line you will see the hurricanes started hitting right around when the USA was attacking.

15 billion dollars or more damage and, get this, the people who got the worst of it were the people who supported Bush.

I hate Bush as much as the next college student, but claiming the victims of tornadoes in Florida were recieving some kind of just retribution is pretty lame.

You needed special tools to maintain weapons (and another tool type to repair them). They did degrade pretty fast (especially early on when maint tools were scarce), but towards the end, the rifle weapon took so few shots to kill anything and maint tools were common enough for it not to be an issue for me.

The main balance problem I saw was that the "standard" weapons category was by far the best (and most versetile) once you got the rifle (and the category was still above average before then). Energy weapons sucked except that the infinite ammo thing helped in the beginning... The only heavy weapon worth it was the nade launcher (which you only needed 1 level of skill to use) and exotic weapons were way underpowered considering how late you got them and how annoying it was to get ammo for them. Hurray I can kill organic enemies *slightly* faster than with a rifle, which I got earlier, has more ammo, and can deal with mechanical targets much better.=\

I'm not arguing that the bnet service should be illegal because it could be used to allow pirates to play, I am saying it *is* illegal because it provides a service another company has developed and copyrighted.

As I said, a game designer spends tons of cash and time on their product... when you purchase that game, you are *not* just paying for the series of ones and zeros on your CD, you are paying for the *service* provided by the game developer (namely, playing on battle.net). When someone else comes along and writes their own software to provide YOUR service, using YOUR game, what they are doing is illegal. Welcome to the information age.

The main thing was that it was possible a pirated copy of the game could used to play online. Just as it is possible that a copyrighted song could be downloaded on a P2P netowrk. Just as it is possible you to cause a 20 car pile-up by driving.

Blizzard created a service that allows paying customers to play their game as they intended... some coders created a service that allows anyone to play their game... Why should Blizzard allow their software to be used in this obviously less beneficial way? Just imagine if another company made a free server for a popular MMO... The original company is the one that developed and tested the game, and now they are supposed to let someone else use it for their own benefit?

Welcome to the information age, where untangible things have significant monetary value. Whether it's showing a feature film on national TV or playing an hour of an MMO, these things represent real services that belong to the owner of the copyright.

Halsy, if they didn't want people to use their software, they shouldn't have marketed then. Yes?

Clearly they want people to use (read, buy) their software, but that doesn't mean they can't regulate its use.

From what I heard, they bnetd guys never intended their program to be used for piracy. They approached Blizzard a few times trying to figure out some way to have their server check CD keys, but Blizzard stonewalled them.

Hehe that's what they all say... But seriously, even if that was their intention, how could you expect Blizzard to comply? "Yeah just send us the valid CD key list or give us access to a high speed authenticating system (tantamount to giving us the CD key list) and we will use it for our server." And Blizzard is supposed to give it to em? Hah. =D

CD-key authentication is not going to work if you start handing out the key list to every bunch of coders who manage to put together a server program. Even if every one of them was a saint, I doubt their nifty server is as secure as Blizzard's... Full key list + Amature server = Not good.

Am I the only one who *doesn't* find it strange that it is illegal to set up your own servers that let you play someone's copyrighted work without a valid CD-key...?

Yeah, I just spent X years and Y hundred thousand (or million) dollars developing my game... of course I will let you make a competing server system for my game that allows consumers to pirate my software instead of buying it... =P

As for the implications of not being able to resell games... well, as mentioned earlier, this ruling does *not* mean you won't be able to. It simply means that the developer/publisher *may* choose to disallow this practice.